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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28518837">Fault</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/sword_and_lance/pseuds/sword_and_lance'>sword_and_lance</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Gundam 00</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Canon, could possibly read as shippy if you wanna i ain't gonna stop you lol, really heed BOTH of those given this is about the aftermath of the friendly fire incident</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 20:09:19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,057</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28518837</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/sword_and_lance/pseuds/sword_and_lance</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The AEU friendly fire incident, and what came after.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Kati Mannequin &amp; Sumeragi Lee Noriega</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Fault</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Seemed like a shame to only have this on tumblr so may as well post it here, too!</p>
<p>Takes place pre-canon, hence all the references to Sumeragi's 'real' name "Leesa Kujo". Mostly hurt, little comfort; gets dark in (what I hope is) a canon-appropriate manner. Though considering this is Gundam 00, that is very dark, indeed.</p>
<p>As for where this came from? If no one else was gonna write it, I sure was. :) Enjoy, I hope.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Seemingly the <em>second</em> the carrier touched down in the desert, Kati had darted out of it, making a beeline for the hastily-erected medic tents with a couple of her ship’s soldiers doing their best to keep up with her.</p>
<p>(<em>Not that she noticed them at all. </em>The startled yelp of <em>those are friendlies</em> from one of her pilots just weaved itself between every thought, spinning like a broken record and leaving a horrible leaden <em>weight</em> in her chest–)</p>
<p>She grabbed a wandering soldier by the collar, yanking him down to her height and hissing a question–<em>where is she?!</em>–and the fear in his eyes reflected the sharp tension in hers. Her snappish side was usually much better concealed than this, but–</p>
<p>(<em>This is your fault,</em><em>you made a mistake, you </em><em><b>didn’t </b></em><em>verify who was even attacking you, and just shot back.</em>)</p>
<p>She only let him go once he gestured, still outpacing the couple of her soldiers behind her–doubly so when she slipped between beds and medics like smoke.</p>
<p>(<em>You dedicated your life to reducing casualties, not causing them.</em>)</p>
<p>And <em>smoke</em> was probably the least unpleasant smell in the place. Blood, the hard sting of antiseptic, <em>so much burnt meat, </em>and other things left unsaid even in her own head. The heat even in the shade made her flick her hat off of her head <em>she couldn’t really breathe well either but she couldn’t stop for two seconds she </em><em><b>saw </b></em><em>her friend over there–</em></p>
<p>(<em>If you can’t do this then what can you do?</em>)</p>
<p>She didn’t really need to be <em>told</em> that Emilio was dead. Leesa calling his name and the sudden jolt that rippled through the nearby medics <em>said</em> more than enough.</p>
<p>(<em>you did this</em>)</p>
<p>“Kujo.” </p>
<p>But even when the younger woman had gotten not-unkindly backed away, Kati didn’t get a response.</p>
<p>(<em>your fault</em>)</p>
<p>“Leesa.”</p>
<p><em>That</em>, at least, got a slight twitch of the head in her direction.</p>
<p>(<em>your fault</em>)</p>
<p>(<em>shut up shut </em><em><b>up</b></em>)</p>
<p>They had to get out of here. That much was still clear to the lone little piece of her rationality that stubbornly refused to reel away in horror and <em>pain </em>at being confronted with the consequences of <em>her shoddy forecasting</em>–the longer they stood here in the middle of the wounded the more it would hurt not <em>just</em> them but the people around them that knew what had happened <em>and would definitely blame them for it.</em> (Was being able to string two thoughts together despite the sick burn of <em>guilt</em> an advantage in a forecaster or just a terrible fault in a human being?) “We have to go.” She almost hated how even her own voice was–better suited a tone for lightly chiding a roommate for staying up too late than for anything <em>like this.</em> </p>
<p>When she reached for Leesa’s shoulder, she felt it stiffen slightly under her hand. But before a near-inevitable argument could happen, she cut it off. “We can’t stay here.” She left no <em>time</em> for objections and firmly slid her hand over so her arm was behind Leesa’s shoulders and she tried to believe that she didn’t hear some of the whispered comments from the few soldiers that weren’t completely downed, or feel how they were making her friend shrink in on herself with every step.</p>
<p>But even <em>that</em> only lasted until they got back to the carrier–<em>hers, because at least some of her own men weren’t blaming her for this–</em>and into her quarters.</p>
<p>(<em>They’d have to wait to be </em><em><b>judged </b></em><em>and this was good a place as any–</em>)</p>
<p>The eerie silence, not even punctuated by ship engines now, leaving nothing else at all to focus on, seemed to shatter whatever thin veneer of protective shock that had fallen over her friend, however. And barely had the door closed and the two of them gotten just a few paces in before Kujo dropped to her knees and nearly took her completely down in the process.</p>
<p>And Leesa <em>screamed, </em>a horrible drawn-out wail like that of a woman dying.</p>
<p>(Much, much later, she’d wonder if <em>Leesa</em> really had.)</p>
<p>The sound might as well have physically ripped Kati open, and she fell too. She clutched Leesa to her and the woman crushed a section of jacket in her fists as she sobbed harshly into Kati’s shoulder, and there wasn’t anything she could <em>do</em> and she couldn’t even get herself to do the same with her–not even this level of trauma (<em>it </em>was <em>trauma wasn’t it</em>) could wring more than a few silent tears out of her, disappearing near unnoticed down the side of her jaw, and even that didn’t soothe the grief burning like bile through her chest and up her throat until she felt physically <em>sick</em> from it.</p>
<p>(<em>At least she doesn’t blame you.</em> Even having the thought shamed her, but it coiled around her mind anyway as Leesa begged apologies in a voice almost too hoarse to be coherent, to a man no longer alive to hear them. <em>At least you both understand.</em>)</p>
<p>(<em>At least you </em><em><b>both </b></em><em>failed.</em>)</p>
<p>–</p>
<p>It might have been minutes; it might have been hours. There was a small part of Kati that was half-convinced it had been <em>days</em>. But regardless, it had been long enough that her back and legs ached with the positions they had been in, and it had also been long enough that her poor friend had cried herself voiceless, though Kujo hadn’t let her grip slacken a single inch and her entire body trembled as if fevered from sheer exhaustion. Only now did Kati even <em>try</em> to move, and when she did, she was forced to pause when Leesa managed to rasp out a single word.</p>
<p>“<em>No</em>.”</p>
<p>She swallowed hard past a lump in her throat that she had yet to get rid of. “Lees–”</p>
<p>“Don’t go.”</p>
<p>She blinked rapidly and her jaw clenched in an entirely instinctual effort to keep herself under control–<em>she couldn’t be </em><em><b>weak </b></em><em>she couldn’t ever afford that especially </em><em><b>not now</b></em><em>–</em>and stayed still just for the moment. “I’m…” Her voice cracked and she had to try again. “I’m not. But we should move.” </p>
<p>(At least Kati could just <em>not think about</em> the flashes of battle and gunsmoke and dying men that refused to stop threatening the edges of her thoughts like so many wolves.)</p>
<p>When she got just a shuddering sigh in response, only then did she feel at all comfortable in moving again; the pins and needles from being stuck in place so long left her stumbling and Kujo was possibly even worse, sagging against her and making the barest effort to walk, but they slowly trudged their way towards the bed proper anyway, even if it may as well have been entire miles of distance to their weary bodies. But even as she set her friend down, she refused to get off of her traitorous legs, threatening though they were to give out under her in protest. “Stay here.” And thankfully, Leesa just stayed put exactly as asked as she backed off and then turned to head into the bathroom–</p>
<p>(<em>Should you be worrying about that you can’t make mistakes again</em>)</p>
<p>She froze and had to lean sideways against the sink as her vision <em>slid</em> and everything reeked of roasted blood and mangled bodies only partially hidden under bands of red-and-black-soaked gauze and men moaned in agony around her–</p>
<p>“Kati?”</p>
<p>She barely heard it; had she gone any <em>deeper</em>, she might not have registered it at all. But the soft call of her name served to jolt her out of it, the tableau of dust and blood suddenly resolving into her gripping the sink with both hands staring at a wide-eyed shaggy-haired woman in the mirror–<em>herself</em> in the mirror, only belatedly realizing that her chest was tight <em>she couldn’t breathe </em>except shallowly and she had to swallow back her own nausea. <em>She had to focus, </em>though even stripping her gloves and glasses off and splashing water on her face only served to slow her racing thoughts instead of stopping them entirely. <em>She had to focus. </em>When it came to choosing between herself or one of her closest friends? It was no question that the latter predominated. It <em>always</em> had and she had to be stronger than this.</p>
<p>(It wasn’t even a question of wanting it was a question of <em>needing</em> to be a pillar, an unyielding rock. She was one of the few people that actually had the inner <em>steel</em> for it.)</p>
<p>By the time she finished with that and got a cloth wetted, she had shoved the entire thing back into the depths of thought it had boiled up out of. She forced herself to breathe more deeply and while it didn’t slow her frantically-hammering heart, it at least took the edges off of the blind panic that had just tried to assail her. The air vent served to make otherwise-lukewarm water significantly colder on her face, as she slid her glasses back on; her entire head pounded with an impending headache, but that was easily ignored and a quick dry-swallow of a pill would (hopefully) solve that later anyway.</p>
<p>(<em>Focus.</em>)</p>
<p>She felt Leesa staring but neither of them said a word about it–there was no point in saying what they both already understood, even if she couldn’t meet the younger woman’s gaze until she had to, sitting back down next to her. (There wasn’t anything Kati <em>could </em>say, and she could only assume Leesa felt the same.) She dabbed at the other’s face with the cloth and loosened up the tie, and then the jacket with the other hand (and gloves as well, before the staining on them could set either of them off again), turning that hand back to do the same to her own–only then realizing just how much she <em>hadn’t</em> been breathing right before then. With her (much lighter) undershirt her only cover, a weight that hadn’t been entirely physical had lifted off of her shoulders, leaving nothing but an ache behind (though was <em>that</em> physical, too, or just the result of even her intense near-counterproductive resilience coming back to bite her in the only way it possibly could?). She didn’t <em>say</em> anything, still, but she laid back on her side and her friend wasn’t far behind, all but burrowing into her and squeezing sore reddened eyes closed. Kati rested a hand on her side, the pad of her thumb moving absentmindedly, but that only served to earn her a shuddering sigh that feathered out into the hollow of her neck, and nothing more. But still: she didn’t pull away. So Kati didn’t, either.</p>
<p>(<em>At least she doesn’t blame you.</em>)</p>
<p>–</p>
<p>Of course, they eventually <em>had</em> to leave; she felt the ship jolt and the telltale vibrations of its engines one morning, though she only knew the time by the clock, with the total lack of natural light in her quarters. It was not something completely foreign to her, but the complete lack of work to go along with it was…maddening.</p>
<p>(She would later overhear the guard outside her door–<em>yes they had </em><em><b>guards</b></em><em>, as if they were able to run anywhere–</em>call it like watching a penned-in Border Collie slowly losing it from confinement, and she wouldn’t disagree with that assessment. She was <em>meant to work</em> and yet she wasn’t allowed, not while they were both under investigation.)</p>
<p>(Not that the thought of having anything to <em>do</em> with forecasting didn’t set a frisson of fear down her spine, because it absolutely <em>did</em>, but she rarely backed down from such things and even that was better than sitting around doing almost nothing.)</p>
<p>But even then, she was still taking it better than Leesa was; <em>she</em> just wandered around like a ghost, when she wasn’t just sleeping in an obvious bid to avoid the depression crushing the life out of her. In fact, it was arguable that she only even bothered to take the most basic care of herself because Kati simply would not let the matter <em>go</em> until she did that much. Sure, more than once it had nearly started fights, leaving a smothering tension in the air, but…</p>
<p>She also hadn’t failed to notice that it didn’t take long for Leesa to come back, either. She didn’t <em>want</em> to be alone and constantly, if silently, always had some kind of contact going–leaning shoulder to shoulder, sitting back to back, curling up next to her with fingers twined tightly together, and on the scattered occasions that Kati <em>could </em>actually leverage her tiredness against her insomnia–another maddening thing that wouldn’t leave her alone–Leesa was right there, and though it was impossible to tell who would start it when they were both only semi-functional at best, it was hard to miss how they’d still wake up pressed up against one another as if that would somehow help.</p>
<p>Maybe it did, for all she knew. She was hardly the most tactile of people–quite the opposite, under normal circumstances, but <em>this was not normal</em> and so she didn’t just put up with it, but welcomed it, even if she’d never admit it out loud even to a friend as close as she was.</p>
<p>(Not that either of them were doing particularly <em>well</em>, but it was about the best they could get right now, and she’d take it for what it was. It wouldn’t last forever before their own employers would interfere.)</p>
<p>–</p>
<p>Of course they barely got a moment to breathe once they landed. They had to be debriefed, and that inevitably meant counseling…but the moment Kati started on it, she <em>absolutely despised it.</em></p>
<p>It was all meaningless platitudes and commands to all but gaslight herself in some vain attempt to get herself to believe that it <em>wasn’t that bad, </em>that somehow what she had done was <em>acceptable</em> just because it was an accident. <em>An accident, yes;</em> a misstep that had killed people that had trusted her to keep them alive, and no amount of talking and phrasing the same goddamned faulty logic in different ways over and over was going to erase that.</p>
<p>(Much later, she would–albeit not intentionally–figure out that she had been labeled <em>fractious</em> because of that. <em>Fractious</em>, like she was some <em>cat</em> in a shelter that just couldn’t understand what was best for it.)</p>
<p>It shouldn’t have been a surprise that she shut down so quickly and just started repeating herself; she would just treat it like the interrogation it was, though somehow, when it was coming from people who actually meant well, it felt <em>worse</em>. </p>
<p>(Especially when she couldn’t help but wonder what they were telling her <em>friend</em> while she was being handled separately. Any time she tried to ask, once they were both left to their own devices once more, she just got a smile that was not an actual smile at all and a response that <em>she shouldn’t worry about it.</em>..which just made her worry about it more.)</p>
<p>It did little but tell her what she already knew: she had killed people and had to do better by them, and someone in her position was not allowed to <em>make mistakes</em>. Especially not twice. And some things she had done she would never be able to escape; she could only keep going and try to make up for it.</p>
<p>But the more they went the more Leesa withdrew…well, it probably wasn’t a coincidence that Kati’s shoulders started to ache almost constantly with tension and her jaw hurt when she woke up in the mornings. Even medication didn’t fully stop that, nor did it help her feel that much better about the situation at large…it just made it marginally more bearable.</p>
<p>It wouldn’t help for whatever was ahead, once their superiors finally decided to talk to them. That, she was sure of.</p>
<p>–</p>
<p>“<em>You’re both just too intelligent.”</em></p>
<p>Kati stalked down the hall, her ill-concealed temper driving her own men, some half as big again as she was, out of her way without her having to say a word.</p>
<p>“<em>We don’t see a reason to find either of you at fault.”</em></p>
<p>She hadn’t <em>needed</em> another reminder that the world was a terrible place with no logic or sense, just cruelty that wasn’t even intentional more often than not.</p>
<p>“<em>Faulty intelligence was the driver of this incident, not you personally.”</em></p>
<p>There was no mercy here, no matter how often she tried to believe there was.</p>
<p>“<em>You’re both too valuable an asset to lose.”</em></p>
<p>An <em>asset</em>, was that all she was? What <em>else</em> would she be able to get away with just because some bureaucrat at a desk thought her skills were too good <em>for them</em> to do without?</p>
<p>(<em>But what would you do if they </em><em><b>had </b></em><em>discharged you? </em>She didn’t even have an answer to that, but being found guiltless for killing people <em>should</em> make someone feel bad, no matter what anyone else thought of that.)</p>
<p>She didn’t have guards around her door, at least, and it hissed open with a distinctly artificial sound…</p>
<p>…No one was here. </p>
<p>
  <em>Wasn’t Leesa supposed to be back by now?</em>
</p>
<p>The thought nagged at her as she glanced around, but a glint caught her eye and she went right for it. Her heart sank–<em>dog tags</em>, definitely not her own and most definitely her friend’s, on top of a note that she automatically reached for and skimmed over. It didn’t take long–just a bare handful of sentences.</p>
<p>
  <em>I can’t keep doing this. I don’t deserve you. I’m sorry.</em>
</p>
<p>And that was it. Just a single short statement that still managed to make her mentally reel as surely as if she had been punched. She didn’t even realize that the nails of her free hand were digging into her hand until she raised it to punch the wall in a burst of misdirected anger and the <em>sting</em> grew too intense to ignore.</p>
<p>(She wasn’t completely lost to it, she <em>knew</em> it was misdirected. And yet, that didn’t stop it from burning furiously in her chest anyway.)</p>
<p>Did nothing <em>she </em>thought about what they deserved or not have any say in this?!</p>
<p>But there was no one to even argue with now. She was alone (<em>you’ve always been haven’t you why else would you be like this?</em>), and she would just have to deal with that.</p>
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